When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Every letter was a love letter.

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.